Experiencing Materiality: Museum Perspectives

By Valentina Gamberi

Representing a cutting-edge study of the junction between theoretical anthropology, material culture studies, religious studies and museum anthropology, this study examines the interaction between the human and the nonhuman in a museum setting usually defined as ‘non-Western’, ‘non-scientific’ and ‘religious.’ Combining an on-site analysis of exhibitive spaces with archival research and interviews with museum curators, the chapters highlight contradictions of museum practices, and suggests that museum practitioners use museum spaces and artefacts as a way of formulating new theoretical stances in material culture studies, thus viewing museums as producers of theories together with affective engagements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Feb 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800730359

Valentina Gamberi

Valentina Gamberi was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology in Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, from 2019 to 2020. She is currently one of the recipients of the junior fellowship at the Research Centre for Material Culture in Leiden. Her English articles are featured in Culture and Religion, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Material Religion and Environmental Philosophy.

Book preview

EXPERIENCING MATERIALITY

Experiencing Materiality

Museum Perspectives

Valentina Gamberi

First published in 2021 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2021 Valentina Gamberi

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gamberi, Valentina, author.

Title: Experiencing materiality : museum perspectives / Valentina Gamberi.

Description: First Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020041647 (print) | LCCN 2020041648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789209846 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781800730359 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Material culture. | Anthropological museums and collections. | Museums—Curatorship.

Classification: LCC GN406 .G36 2021 (print) | LCC GN406 (ebook) | DDC 306—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041647

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041648

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-984-6 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-035-9 ebook

To my family

A scuola mi somministrano tonnellate di nozioni che digerivo con diligenza, ma che non mi riscaldavano le vene.

Guardavo gonfiare le gemme in primavera, luccicare la mica nel granito, le mie stesse mani, e dicevo dentro di me: ‘Capirò anche questo, capirò tutto, ma non come loro vogliono. Troverò una scorciatoia, mi farò un grimaldello, forzerò le porte’.

—Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico

In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ‘I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors.’

—Translation by Raymond Rosenthal, 1984

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls

Chapter 2. Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred within Museum Walls: Metalogues in Dialogue with Scholarship

Chapter 3. Manipulating Sacred Force: Scrolls and Copies

Chapter 4. Material Engagements in the Colony: Legacies and Changes in Perspective

Chapter 5. Reconstructing the Sacred: Temples or Museum Galleries?

Chapter 6. When Religious Power Is Limiting: The World Museum in Liverpool

Chapter 7. For a Reappraisal of Phenomenology: A Perspectival Approach to Materiality

Conclusions. Returning to Museums

Appendix to the Pictures

References

Index

Illustrations

The images shown in this book are from temporary or permanent exhibitions where the author had been given permission to photograph and publicly publish them.

Figure 4.1. The Harrison Rotunda of the Penn Museum.

Figure 4.2. The Crystal Ball of the Imperial Palace in Peking.

Figure 4.3. What remains of Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple in the Harrison Rotunda; a Thai artisan has realized the temple infrastructure.

Figure 4.4. Photograph of the author; the glass surface reflects the Rotunda and the researcher in a phenomenological dynamic.

Figures 4.5 and 4.6. Maxwell Sommerville and his Buddhist Temple (in the second image, readers can see Sommerville sitting on the side of the temple with his robe).

Figure 5.1. A processional palanquin at the Oriental Museum.

Figure 5.2. Particular of a shrine’s drawer at the Oriental Museum.

Figure 5.3. The shrine dedicated to Lakshmi at the Oriental Museum.

Figure 5.4. The shrine to Ardhanarishvara at the Oriental Museum.

Figure 5.5. The shrine dedicated to Kali at the Oriental Museum.

Figure 5.6. The shrine to Santoshi-Maa at the Oriental Museum.

Figure 5.7. Particular of Kali’s shrine at the Oriental Museum.

Figure A.1. Pābūji (on the black mare) defeats Ravana.

Figure A.2. Particular of a paṛ.

Figure A.3. Goddess Chandi sitting in her lotus in the company of a little Ganeś while receiving the visit of Sripati tai Srimata.

Figure A.4. Goddess Chandi in her form of Durga; Ganeś in the bottom left and Sripati tai Srimata in the bottom right.

Figure A.5. Particular of a chaksudan pat.

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is the result of five years of reflection, desperation and invention – of thoughts and selves. After receiving my Ph.D., I experienced one of the most challenging and metamorphic periods of my life, spanning from a profound existential crisis towards my suitability for academia to a desire to contribute to a world, that of museums and exhibition design, that had been alluring to the deepest recesses of my creative self. In the meantime, my scholarly thinking has evolved and keeps always morphing, to the extent that words written in 2015 and 2016 are adjusted to and interpreted under the light of this flux of thoughts. The book is, therefore, a trace of a thinking self, what Alfred Gell (1998) would have called an œuvre – although I do not deem myself to be at the level of such an artist as Duchamp, I am just a being-in-the-world, after all.

In a certain sense, my ethnographic experience in eight museums scattered around Europe and the USA five, six years ago continues to talk to my current self, and certain dilemmas are still weighing on my mind: can we think of a world without museums? Can material religion serve as a source of inspiration for new methods of cultural encounter and creative works on materiality, escaping the Orientalist trap? My postdoctoral fellowship in Academia Sinica and the new ethnographic endeavour in the Taiwanese context has helped me in reviewing my doctoral research in a situation of temporary stability, after a couple of years of negotiation between part-time jobs and writing up. Readers, therefore, must expect a diverse strata of thoughts put into dialogue. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have pointed out, a book is neither a subject nor an object, made up of different speeds, times and materialities, human and nonhuman actors entangled with each other.

I am extremely grateful for all these interlockings, without which I could not have finished that remote idea that led me to continue my studies with the Ph.D. The finalization of my first manuscript could not have been possible without my current postdoctoral position in Academia Sinica and for this reason, I would like to thank the Institute of Ethnology, and in particular, my sponsor, Dr Shu-Li Wang, and the director, Professor Hsun Chang, for their appreciation and trust in my work.

Parts of Chapters 2, 5 and 6 are taken from an article – ‘Decolonising Museums: South-Asian Perspectives’ – I published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, which kindly granted permission for the use of its content, and for which reason I deeply thank it. The content of this article helped me to sharpen my argument in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book.

I am extremely thankful to the Kulttuurien museo, the Penn Museum, the World Museum in Liverpool, the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the V&A Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Museum der Kulturen, the Volkerkundenmuseum at the University of Zurich and the Museum Rietberg, without which this research could not have even started.

I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Alana Vincent and Dr Suzanne Owen. Our journey together was constituted by ups and downs, and we did not understand each other completely. Nevertheless, I am grateful to your support and humanity. Thank you for sharing the downsides of academic life, reminding me that we are, first of all, human beings.

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Daniel Rycroft, my external examiner, who has seen the evolution of this work from start to finish and has stimulated my scholarly development, and to Dr Wendy Dossett, my internal examiner.

According to certain cosmologies, in creating something new, we must pay homage to our ancestors. In this case, I must be thankful for my anthropological guide and master, Professor Cesare Poppi, who has demonstrated himself to be a putative father during my existential crisis towards academia, for following my evolution from undergraduate to postdoctoral researcher.

I thank Dr Roberto Brigati for his support during my most challenging transition period. I express my sheer gratitude to Dr Lucia Zaietta, and for our engaging debates on Merleau-Ponty despite the distance. I also thank Dr Elisa Farinacci for our conversations on materiality. Very much food for thought!

A special thank-you goes to my friends, Miss Eleonora Adorni and Dr Alessandro Nannini. Thank you, Eleonora, for teaching me forgiveness and resilience, despite our very different approaches to life. A very warm thank-you to the brilliant Alessandro, with whom I have been sharing the sweat and intellectual exaltations of our jobs. I would also like to thank so much my lovely Ph.D. comrade and friend Dr Emily Pennington – a shoulder on which I can always rely, in good and bad moments. I express gratitude to all my other friends, far away or close, in Asia, Europe and everywhere else, for their laughs and compassion.

A touching thought goes to all those orphans and abandoned children who have not the possibilities of finding their talents and ways of expression as I have had. I will carry on the responsibility of representing their dreams as a small molecule of that world. This book has been published when my social assistant, Selma Santiago da Costa, has departed from this world. I hope children in the world can have the privilege of being rescued by strong women like her. I promise I will never again feel embarrassed in talking about my origins. They are what I am.

Last but not least, I would express my love to my family, to whom this book is dedicated. Many thanks to my nonhuman mates, and first of all, my cat, for bearing my temper when the days are bad and for nurturing cherished moments. Thanks to every cup of tea, every colour, every leaf, every drop of rain: what the world is made of, who I am.

Taipei, December 2020

Introduction

Lorsque l’on cherche à rendre compte de sa complexité spécifique, l’objet animé est en réalité beaucoup plus proche d’un cristal que d’un miroir. C’est une image multiple, plurielle, composée de traits partiels et inachevés, provenant d’identités différentes et parfois antagonistes.

—Carlo Severi, L’objet-personne¹

Materiality, or the Problem

I was observing the pats belonging to a member of a cultural organization in the UK which promotes Indian folk art in the art market, at the home of the owner. Pats are scrolls depicting religious scenes, mostly Hindu deities, as well as social themes, and are used by painter-storytellers in West Bengal. The pats were rolled up and placed on the floor. Suddenly, their owner’s little child appeared and looked at the scrolls with interest. His face depicted a clear desire to touch them, and he put his little toe on the frame of a pat with the intention of jumping on it. His mother shouted at him, saying that deities cannot be trampled on; they must be respected. The pats influenced the child’s behaviour and intervened in the relationship between mother and son: on the one hand, they invite the child’s propensity to play, and on the other, they reproduce the religious conduct of respect and reverence that regulates the everyday activity of the child’s family. Non-living things, human and nonhuman are therefore interwoven, interdependent. Ingold (2000, 103) suggests abandoning categories such as human and nonhuman and viewing them as organisms developing according to a self-transformation triggered by being immersed in the environment (ibid., 345–82). Rather than a willing mind opposed to a non-willing matter, in what Ingold (ibid., 103) calls the relational model, mind coincides with the world itself. Thoughts, emotions, memories are directly given via the embodied engagement with the world, a world that it is itself animated (Ingold 2006).

Ingold derives his relational model from Heidegger’s (1971) essay The Thing. The latter is structured around Heidegger’s investigation of a blue jug. If we interrogate ourselves about the ‘what’ of the pitcher, we could say that a jug is made for containing liquids. We arrive at this conclusion because we have talked with its maker or because we refer to a standardized way of using jugs that we have observed during daily life or has been implanted in us at school. It is by thinking of the jug as something made, as a crafted thing that we can also assume the ‘how’ of it. There must be a conch, a vessel that technically allows the deposit of liquid(s). However, the conch is not enough; it is necessary to build around it a protective surface that impedes any liquid from spilling over, and which is anatomically sufficiently fitted to reinforce the base of the conch and give sufficient structure to the whole to prevent its collapse. Our reasoning so far does not define the jug as such, though: we only refer to the different constituents of it that can efficaciously contain liquids (ibid., 165).

Even when we apply the scientific method to our analysis of the jug – that should be detached for its actual making – we are using criteria abstractedly and universally defined, as is proper of scientific investigations. For instance, we can observe that pottery does not absorb water, or we can determine the physical laws to which water and pottery are subjected, or their chemical compositions. However, what we can single out are dynamics that can be described and observed in other materials as aggregates of matter (Heidegger 1971, 168–69). We are still not able to say what makes a jug a thing and which thingness coincides with the pitcher. We can also think that we cannot clearly understand the jug as a thing if we do not compare it with other things and describe its independence from liquids. Indeed, a jug can have different functions according to the user: it can contain flowers or become a nest for insects.

It is undeniable, therefore, that things usually constitute a cognitive problem for humans: they seem inert, as they cannot be animated if they are not moved by humans or animals. Likewise, they cannot be easily described by linguistic means, as their bond with humans pre-exists the birth of language. The material thing condenses social relations, laws and principles, as well as the imagined – for instance, the ancestors’ word – with the real; thus, it is a socially total entity in its expression of all the phenomena and dynamics of a society (Augé 1988, 143–44). The condensing enacted by materiality is possible in virtue of the ‘humility of things’ (Miller 2005, 5), that is to say, the tendency of things’ social properties to resist conscious definitions and understandings and, therefore, to be strictly connected to the human unconscious (Miller 1987, 100). In other words, the more things are not perceived as actors in social relations, the more materiality affects human actions and, conversely, the more humans recognize the impact of the material on their lives, the more they can intervene. We can consider the relationships nurtured by material things as ‘intensive relations’, continually shifting and made up through space and time. They are therefore based upon a substantial ‘ontological instability’ rather than on ontological differences per se (Harvey and Knox 2014, 8).

If we continue with Heidegger’s essay, each relationship that the jug has, even in the scientific analysis, can be read as a projection. The perceiver, since she enters into contact with the jug, projects herself onto the jug. At the same time, the jug projects stimuli to the perceiver. Heidegger calls these projections a ‘mirroring’ of each human and nonhuman actor involved (Heidegger 1971, 177). The jug, the human and the nonhuman perceivers are immersed within a world that pre-exists their existence. They coexist with each other and their subjective meaning cannot be independent of this co-belonging. They express their presence to the world by projecting it onto the others with a mutual appropriation of each other’s reflections (ibid.). There is, therefore, an inescapable condition of ambiguity and fuzziness in the definition of any ‘entity’.

In the formation of the concept of ‘person’, we can see an appropriation of humans towards nonhuman things. Marcel Mauss (1985; cf. 1990) identified the differences between personae and res as a fact of law: personae are the representations or ‘images’ (simulacra and imagines) of the ancestors of the patres familiae gathered in the Roman Senate. Derived from the masks used by actors, through which (per) their voices resound (sonare), persona started to coincide with the essential or true nature of an individual, which in turn coincides with the ownership of a body, ancestors, names and personal belongings. Things, then, are the expressions of ownership, the sole criterion for the identification of an agency. Therefore, they exist only in legal terms. In fact, ‘Germanic and Latinate terms for thing are etymologically related to the words for cause (causa, cosa, chose, Ding)’, and as a result, things ‘tend to be admitted to reality only by legal tribunals and assemblies’ (Cohen 2012, 6). Human projection onto matter seems to be the only way through which humans make sense of the latter. Anthropomorphism is therefore at the core of the very definition of humanity (Miller 2005, 2).

Let us return to the ethnographic example of the Bengali scroll. The collector established some criteria for the scroll, such as its sacredness and how to relate to that sacredness. These criteria can derive from the curator’s engagement with the materiality of the scroll, when she assists in a storytelling performance or contemplates it in a museum or in the intimacy of her home. She projects these criteria onto the scroll. As a result, the scroll, it seemed to me, was for her an ambiguous encroachment between a work of ‘Indian vernacular art’ and a deity’s embodiment.

Nevertheless, her consideration of the scroll did not seal it off from different forms of manipulation and control. Her child saw it as a plaything – maybe because it was rolled up on the floor, reminding him of individual toys or cosy rugs. Can we infer that different actors project different ideas onto the scroll? Probably, this is the case. However, we cannot think of the scroll as something passive and permeable to human whims. There is undeniably something at play between the human and the nonhuman that determines a vast array of unpredictability and heterogeneity.

Starting from this cognitive and experiential conundrum, our vision of material culture seems to crumble. The common idea, for instance, that museum artefacts are malleable to curators’ practices is no longer so obvious. When a religious artefact is displayed, the curator has to deal with behaviours that are in contrast to standard museum etiquette and are out of their control, such as touching despite prohibitions to do so (Elliott 2006), and prayer or meditation (Berns 2015, 2017a, 2017b). Heidegger, therefore, captured something essential in museums: the more one tries to identify the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of an artefact, the more this attempt is frustrated and incomplete. Museums, as sites where visitors know by observing things, continually reproduce this paradox.

Experiencing Materiality responds to an inevitable frustration towards studies of material artefacts and museums. It is an account of curatorial practices towards two types of Indian storytelling scrolls, the pats (from West Bengal) and the paṛs (from Rajasthan), as an example of an interaction between the human and the nonhuman in a setting usually defined as ‘non-Western’, ‘nonscientific’ and ‘religious’. I combined an on-site analysis of exhibitive spaces with archival research and qualitative interviews with museum curators in eight European and American museums which hold collections of pats and paṛs. The chapters highlight the contradictions of museum practices and, at the same time, the potentialities that contemporary museums could offer for an engaging relationship between visitors and museum artefacts, and for rethinking, or better, ‘softening’ specific approaches in material culture studies.

In particular, the book suggests two methodological strategies: on the one hand, to use museum spaces and artefacts as a medium through which to formulate new theoretical stances in material culture studies, thus viewing museums as producers of theories, as well as sensuous engagements. On the other hand, the storytelling scrolls and other South Asian or Asian religious artefacts challenged both the curators and me as a researcher, suggesting unexpected turns in our methodological approaches towards materiality. Experiencing Materiality is thus testimony to the ‘backstage’ of museums. Here, bodies and minds struggle with reflecting on, as well as representing the human symbiosis with, materiality. Humans are engaged and contaminated by material fusion and hybridism.

In the end, I suggest that scholars engaged in the debate on materiality reconsider phenomenology, rather than condemning it. My research on religious artefacts showed that materiality behaves in unexpected ways. Each human actor, no matter her background, prejudices and goals, can only have a partial vision of it that might be in contrast with other human perspectives on the same portion of materiality. Scrolls, religious statues and paintings have and produce, therefore, a myriad of properties, abilities and sensuous engagements that can be hardly contained by the limited, mortal and subjectively biased human condition.

As opposed to considering the latter as an illusion or an obstacle to accessing the ‘real material essence’, as a Kantian standpoint would say, our perspective is the only way through which we can come to terms with materiality. The partiality that materiality expresses to us, I argue, is a potential source of creativity that urges us to deconstruct our assumptions, leading to new languages and forms of knowledge. The approaches towards materiality of the last two or three decades – spanning from Appadurai (1986) and Gell (1998) to new materialisms and Object-Oriented Ontology – seem to me inadequate in addressing the perspectival nature of materiality and material engagements. Materiality has been turned into a debate on agency, thereby forcing the fundamental hybridism between it and humans into a causal ‘point of origin’ that must be necessarily located in the human or in the material pole. The risk of this quest for agency is that it reduces the richness and potentiality of material engagement into rigid and unilateral categories that cannot account for social phenomena. If we take the example of museums, the idea that materiality is a mere reflection of a curatorial agenda hinders the development of terrain of dialogue with local communities and visitors. In particular, curators cannot predict, or are not able to face, the unpredictable material engagements within galleries. They might, consequently, guide visitors too rigidly or design exhibitions that do not include or respond to the sheer variety of the audience’s expectations, needs and backgrounds. Experiencing Materiality humbly deconstructs these curatorial and scholarly limits, and corroborates the achievements of the so-called ‘New Museology’ (Vergo 1989; Karp and Lavine 1991; Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992; Karp, Kratz, Szwaja and Ybarra-Frausto 2006) with new food for thought.

Some Annotations on Language, Part I: Why Materiality?

My adoption of the term ‘materiality’ throughout this book consciously emphasizes two aspects of the scholarly coming to terms with material culture. I want to deconstruct some common-sense assumptions on museums and material things by taking inspiration from a reflection of Tim Ingold (2013). Ingold establishes a sharp differentiation between material artefacts, or more broadly, materiality and materials. ‘Materiality’ is connected with hylomorphism, namely the idea that